The Queen's Cipher

by David Taylor

  This was his cue to bury his head in the books once again. “The editors have got it wrong,” he finally announced. “The name is ‘Francis’ in both quarto and folio editions of the play. The ‘i’ becomes an ‘e’ because Shakespeare editors can’t imagine Costard marrying a man. They’re assuming that ‘marry’ means ‘wed’ when Shakespeare often used the verb to mean ‘unite’ or ‘associate.’ So the alternative reading of Costard’s line is ‘link me to one Francis.’ It makes you wonder. Perhaps Costard wasn’t the only lame goose or should I say lame duck.”

  Before his university card was stolen, Freddie had borrowed a copy of the Promus, Francis Bacon’s personal notebook. “Listen to this,” he told her. “It’s a sentence Bacon jotted down. ‘I may be a shadow across their path without being an obstruction to them.’”

  “I wonder what he meant by that.”

  She heard him gasp. “The next entry is ‘To stumble at the threshold.’”

  “Bloody hell, you’re not making this up, are you, Freddie?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and went back to the text of the play. “Here’s more triplication, the word ‘remuneration’ is mentioned three times. Armado asks Costard to deliver a letter and offers him payment. Armado calls this ‘remuneration’ which Costard takes to be the Latin word for three-farthings.”

  “That’s a small coin isn’t it Freddie? It’s mentioned again in King John when the royal bastard Falconbridge says he cannot stick a rose in his ear ‘lest men say look where three-farthings goes!’ I didn’t get the bit about the rose though.”

  *

  Queen Elizabeth gritted her teeth. She had commissioned a three-farthing coin to take the place of the silver farthing. It had an effigy of her on its obverse side with a rose behind her head. Thereafter, when gossiping about her supposed bastard, people referred to him as ‘three-farthings,’ linking man’s meanest estate with her meanest currency. The wretched coin had been minted in 1561, her annus horribilis in which she almost lost her crown.

  This play was like a goad and, with her courtiers’ eyes upon her, all she could do was to sit and look as if she was enjoying herself.

  *

  “I don’t know whether I’ve told you this,” Freddie began. “In my teens I was treated for depression by a neurological psychiatrist who used images and associations to awaken my buried memories. I think that’s what is going on here.”

  “Could be,” she replied. “Maybe that’s what Bacon meant when he talked about veiling the truth in parables and allegories in The Advancement of Learning.”

  “He also said ‘The truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.’ Drama is fiction represented in performance.”

  *

  By Act Four she had got the message. Beneath her canopy in the Great Chamber Queen Elizabeth was seething with rage. He had turned her mythology against her. She had encouraged her subjects to worship her as the Virgin Huntress without even thinking about Diana’s other attribute as the goddess of childbirth. Yet the play’s imagery kept on emphasising this dichotomy.

  The French princess was meant to be her, indulging in her favourite blood sport of deer hunting but showing a marked disinclination to kill the deer, saying she would only do so for ‘fame’s sake.’ This, mark you, from a princess who was also said to be ‘prayerful,’ ‘pierced’ and ‘pricked’ and who possessed too thick a waist to wear a virgin’s girdle. The inference could hardly have been clearer: penetration had led to pregnancy. Yet no one seemed to have picked up on it. Her courtiers were laughing loudly at the bawdy bits without questioning their hidden meaning.

  The act had begun ominously with an apparently harmless exchange in which the French princess asked whether it was the King of Navarre galloping up the hillside on his horse and being told it wasn’t him. Whoever it was, the princess replied, ‘showed a mounting mind.’ It was such an old joke. She hadn’t heard this crude pun for forty years. Not since her decision to appoint Robin Dudley Master of the Horse had started off stories about her alleged lover having a ‘mounting mind.’

  After the act’s false start, Shakespeare had written an incredibly lewd comic scene describing how an archer’s arrow might hit the target, giving the woman the ‘upshot’ by ‘cleaving’ her pin, before moving on to a doggerel verse about a ‘pricket’ that metamorphosed in a thicket. This was an adaptation of the Diana and Actaeon myth. Ovid was certainly working overtime in this foul-mouthed play.

  Above the actors’ brittle repartee she could hear his voice talking to her. She had refused to listen to him, banning him from court, and here he was using a Christmas comedy as a coded form of communication. She knew her secret was safe with him but he obviously wanted something in exchange.

  She felt faint and breathless. The room was too hot.

  “Is your Majesty unwell?” The Earl of Essex had turned round on his stool and was eyeing her with dismay. “Is there anything I can do?”

  No, Robert, she wanted to say, unless you can bring your stepfather back from the grave. How she missed her bonny sweet Robin.

  *

  “Funny thing,” said Cheryl looking at the Folio facsimile. “The stage direction changes at the start of Act Four. The princess of France is now described as the Queen.”

  Freddie rifled through his papers. “You’re right. The same thing happens in the 1598 quarto edition. From Act Four onwards she is a queen. It’s probably a printing error.” The quizzical look in his eyes hinted at a different explanation.

  “The princess has very mixed feelings about hunting. Was that common in the Elizabethan age?”

  “Oh yes,” he enthused. “There was a very strong anti-hunting lobby. The forest laws, which reserved hunting rights for the ruling class, were so barbaric that anyone caught poaching on the lord’s land could be castrated, blinded or staked out to die in freezing water.”

  “That’s gross, that is. Whatever happened to Merry England?”

  “Merry England wasn’t a complete myth. There was dancing around the maypole and a lot of feasting and drinking but peasants had to know their place.”

  “Anyway, what do you make of the princess asking where to stand to make ‘the fairest shoot’? In his reply the forester repeats the word ‘shoot’ twice. It’s the rule of three again!”

  Shakespeare’s Bawdy came off the book shelf. “The verb ‘shoot’ indicates ‘the pointing of the male towards the female generative organ’ with or without ‘a further allusion to the emission of the seminal arrow or bullet.’ That’s what it says here.”

  Cheryl stretched out her arms to him. “Ooh! I do love it when you talk dirty. Why don’t you come over here and join me on the tutor’s shagging couch.”

  “Been there, done that,” he said breezily. “In any case the dirty mind belongs to Master Shakespeare.”

  This puzzled her. “Why do you insist on talking about Shakespeare in the singular when you think he and Bacon were a team and, in this play at least, Bacon must have been the lead figure?”

  Freddie looked at her in that special way of his, warm and ironic at the same time. “But I don’t know that for sure. I imagine it’s the case because of the cipher but I haven’t proved it and may never do so. Sorry to sound so pedantic but I prefer to keep Shakespeare and Bacon separate in my mind. That way I can retain some kind of perspective.”

  “Here’s my perspective. The princess goes into rhyming couplets to register how conflicted she is: unwilling to kill the deer but compelled to do so to preserve her reputation.”

  And out of question, so it is sometimes –

  Glory grows guilty of detested crimes

  When for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,

  We bend to that the working of the hart,

  As I for praise alone now seek to spill

  The poor deer’s blood that my heart means no ill.

  “And there’s more triplication here. The word ‘thickest’ is repeated three times in an exchange between the pr
incess and the clown in which she contrasts her maidenhead with the loose morals of her ladies-in-waiting. Yet this paragon of virtue has a thick waist.”

  Costard: God dig-you-de’en, all. Pray you, which is the head lady?

  Princess: Thou shalt know her, fellow, by the rest that have no heads.

  Costard: Which is the greatest lady, the highest?

  Princess: The thickest and the tallest.

  Costard: The thickest and the tallest – it is so, truth is truth.

  An your waist, mistress, were as slender as my wit

  One o’ these maids’ girdles for your waist should be fit.

  Are not you the chief woman? You are the thickest here.

  Freddie stroked his chin reflectively. “I think we’re into mythology now. There was an ancient Greek custom whereby, on the eve of a girl’s wedding, she offered her virginal girdle to the goddess Artemis seeking protection from the dangers of childbirth. Artemis is the Greek version of Diana the virgin huntress, an absolutely central figure in the cult of Elizabeth.”

  “A huntress protecting her quarry, a pregnant virgin – that’s a crazy, mixed up goddess!”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a long time since I read the Diana myth but I don’t remember her thick waist. Her height was often mentioned. She towered above her nymphs.”

  But as the act progressed the focus shifted from Diana to the victimised deer. In the second scene the comic characters discussed its death and the pedant likened the animal’s blood to a ripe apple that had fallen to earth. The Latin words for sky and earth were each given three English synonyms. The rule of three once again, as Cheryl felt obliged to point out.

  Nathaniel: Very reverend sport, truly, and done in testimony of a good conscience.

  Holofernes: The deer was, as you know – sanguis – in blood, ripe as the pomewater who how hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.

  “Look at the schoolmaster’s vocabulary,” Freddie said. “Sanguine is the Prince of Wales’ heraldic colour while the pomewater is also called a ‘pomeroyal.’ In Holofernes’ fanciful brain the stricken deer is a royal fruit that falls to earth as a crab apple, an inferior windfall.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? A court conspiracy has led to the fostering out of a royal child whose status is reduced thereby.”

  Having delivered this sweeping judgement, Cheryl began to root through the Shakespeare glossary. “Chastity is a woman’s ‘jewel’ in Pericles and The Tempest; sexual intercourse is likened to ‘a fall off a tree’ in Henry VI and is considered to ‘soil’ women in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. But how does the crab apple get into it?”

  A book of Greek myths was removed from the bookcase. “You’re going to like this,” he told her. “A deer escaped the bow of the virgin huntress Artemis and sought sanctuary under a wild apple tree. Maybe the princess didn’t kill the deer after all. And it also says here that Artemis presided over an ancient fertility rite that culminated in a door opening to reveal either a goose or a child. We’re back to the riddle in Act Three.”

  Cheryl nodded sagely. It all seemed to fit together. “What comes next?” she wondered.

  Nathaniel: Truly, master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least. But, sir, I assure ye it was a buck of the first head.

  Holofernes: Sir Nathaniel, haud credo.

  Dull: ‘Twas not an ‘auld grey doe,’ ‘twas a pricket.

  Holofernes: Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were in via, in way, of explication, facere, as it were, replication, or rather ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed, fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer.

  “Why is the statement that the deer was a pricket held to be vulgar and unpleasant? Is it another dirty word? It certainly sounds like one.”

  “Could be,” Freddie was non-committal. “Here’s a riddle for you. What was a month old at Cain’s birth that’s not yet five weeks old?”

  She didn’t need to think about it. “That’s easy. It’s the Moon.”

  “That’s right, but for some reason the schoolmaster says the ‘allusion’ holds in the ‘exchange’ while the constable talks about ‘collusion’ and ‘pollution.’ That’s three levels of connivance and three mentions of the word ‘exchange.’”

  Holofernes: The moon was a month old when Adam was no more,

  And raught not to five weeks when he came to five score.

  The allusion holds in the exchange.

  Dull: ‘Tis true, indeed, the collusion holds in the exchange.

  Holofernes: God comfort thy capacity, I say th’allusion holds in the exchange.

  Dull: And I say the pollusion holds in the exchange, for the moon is never but a month old

  And I say beside that ‘twas a pricket that the Princess killed.

  “Have you heard of the moon goddess?” Freddie asked. “She takes three forms – Luna above, Diana on earth and Hecate, the evil witch, in the underworld.”

  “So many names,” she said ironically. “It’s enough to make a poor girl’s head spin. But why does ‘the allusion’ hold ‘in the exchange’?”

  “It must be the numerical exchange from five weeks to five score.”

  “Why bring Adam into it.”

  “Those who believed in the divine right of kings held Adam to be the first monarch. He was also, significantly, the first human being to fall from grace.”

  “Umm,” she was far from convinced. “Next up, we have Holofernes reciting a rubbish poem about a pricket that contains a number riddle. What’s this about then?”

  The prayful princess pierced and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket

  Some say a sore, but not a sore till now made sore with shooting.

  The dogs did yell; but ‘L’ to ‘sore’. Then ‘sorel’ jumps from thicket –

  Or pricket sore, or else sorel. The people fall a-hooting.

  If sore be sore then ‘L’ to ‘sore’ makes fifty sores – O sore ‘L’!

  Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more ‘L’.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “Shakespeare is using another of Ovid’s stories about Diana. It goes like this. She is bathing in a spring when the mortal hunter Actaeon stumbles across her and, because she is taller than her accompanying nymphs, he sees her nakedness. He stops and stares; enchanted by her ravishing beauty. She dashes water in his face. He loses the power of speech and turns into a stag whereupon his hounds tear him to pieces. And she preserves her mystery.”

  “What a bitch! You can’t blame a man for looking. But the deer doesn’t die in the poem, does it?”

  “It’s the number thing,” he said. “A sore is a four-year-old male deer. By adding an L it becomes a sorrel or three-year-old deer. A capital L is the Roman numeral for 50 and, therefore, two Ls equal 100 which is ...”

  “Francis Bacon’s number count!”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  “That beneath all this convoluted imagery is the story of a queen about to give birth to a child she cannot acknowledge. If that’s what you think is going on here, why don’t you come out and say so?”

  The force of her challenge seemed to surprise him. “This much I will say. The cult of Elizabeth involved worshipping her as Diana, the goddess of the hunt, the moon and birthing. The iconography in the latter part of her reign was all about the virgin mother, the chaste moon goddess. The Diana and Actaeon myth even appeared on the Whitehall Palace gates.”

  “What about the yelling dogs in the epitaph. Do they belong to Actaeon?”

  “I think they’re courtiers. In the Tudor menagerie Elizabeth’s advisors were known as ‘royal dogs’ and it’s the dogs that are calling for the deer to be transformed. That separates them from the ‘people�
� who ‘fall-a-hooting’ – they’re just subjects reacting to what they see as a palace conspiracy.”

  “What about the pricket? Holofernes mentions it in his poem although earlier he’d acted as if there was somehow shocking about the word. Then there’s the ‘thicket’ out of which the deer jumps.”

  He looked up ‘pricket’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and found an epigram by the first-century Spanish poet Martial. ‘The pricket points the bed but not the side.’ It had been a slang word for an illegitimate baby for almost two thousand years!

  As for ‘thicket’, Shakespeare often used the word figuratively to suggest the most secretive of places and, therefore, as a description of female genitalia. In Measure for Measure he had talked about ‘brakes of ice.’ Brake being a synonym for thicket.

  “Fire and ice, passion and purity, men expect too much of women,” Cheryl reflected.

  Freddie had opened another book. “Look at this entry in Bacon’s Promus: ‘Where harts cast their horns’! According to the play, the princess enters a thicket to shoot the royal hart but ends up transforming the creature into a hornless deer.”

  Her eyes widened as she looked again at the playbook. “What about the last line of the verse – ‘Of one sore I an hundred make’ – the first person singular. It’s become personal all of a sudden.”

  “It certainly has. I am 100 – the fallen man, the royal windfall, the goose crossing the threshold and the deer that jumps out of the thicket. You see how the images multiply and support one another. Our self-satisfied schoolmaster boasts of how his poetic gift is lodged in the ‘womb’ of memory. Bacon believed that extemporary verse strengthened the memory and he also claimed that men’s minds were more receptive to ideas when they were delivered by stage characters like a pedant.”

  “Fair enough, Freddie.” Cheryl was suddenly tired. “How about taking a rest?”